The Quotable Thanissaro

[dhammapal]

This is one of the reasons we develop mindfulness: not to be non-reactive, but to be mindful of what we're doing, of what situation we're in, and of the most skillful thing to be doing right now. Keep that in mind, because the principles of karma, the laws of karma, are not traffic laws that apply only in certain places, only at certain times, on the south side of the street from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, that kind of thing. Karma is a law that applies to all of our actions, 24/7.

So be skillful at all times. No matter what the situation, no matter how minor or major it may seem, we've got the opportunity to do good, to act on skillful intentions — not just good intentions, but intentions that are skillful as well. That requires work. It requires training. This is what we're doing right here. It's important always to keep that in mind, no matter how ordinary or extraordinary the situation. It's a teaching that applies everywhere: What you're doing right now is important, so be careful to do your best.
From: For the Good of the World by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

This is one of the amazing things about the Buddha's teachings: All the great lessons we have to learn are right here. We don't have to speculate about some event way back at the beginning of the universe — that's not relevant. We don't have to pin our hopes on a judgment day at the end of the universe — that's not relevant, either. The relevant things are what we can see for ourselves, right here, right now. Things change: Well, how do they change? Is there a pattern to their change? Watch right here and you'll find out. Watch in a way that grows more precise over time by learning how to make skillful use not only of the present, but also of your memories, and your anticipation of where you want this to lead you in future. Learn to use these things properly and they all become part of the path.
From: One Step at a Time by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

The four noble truths do not stop simply with tales about stress: they approach it from the problem-solving perspective of a person engaged in developing a skill. What this means for the meditator trying to master heightened skillfulness is that these truths cannot be fully comprehended by passive observation. Only by participating sensitively in the process of developing skillful powers of mindfulness, concentration, and discernment — and gaining a practical feel for the relationship of cause and effect among the mental factors that shape that process — can one eradicate the ignorance that obstructs the ending of kamma. Thus, only through developing skillfulness to the ultimate degree can the cycle be brought to equilibrium and, as a result, disband.
From: A Refuge in Skillful Action by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

The Buddha’s pragmatic emphasis is further illustrated by the cluster of topics he treats through cross-questioning: how to understand the workings of kamma, how to understand pleasure and pain, how important caste is in comparison to action, whether the life gone forth can benefit as many people as the practice of sacrifice, what his qualifications for teaching are, and why he teaches the way he does. And actually, all six of these topics are permutations of one: kamma. Pleasure and pain are best understood in terms of the actions that lead to them; people are to be judged by their actions rather than their caste; the life gone forth enables one to find and teach to numerous beings the path of action leading to the end of suffering, something no sacrifice can do; the Buddha is qualified to teach because of the skillful way he has mastered the principles of cause and effect in training his mind; and the way he teaches — and in particular, his use of cross-questioning itself — is a primary example of how the kamma of collaborative effort works.
From: Skill in Questions: How the Buddha Taught by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

The Buddha taught dukkha as a common characteristic to make us reflect on the things we cling to: are they really worth holding onto? If not, why keep holding on? If life offered no pleasures better than those we already get from clinging, the Buddha's insistence on the stress in things like flower-gazing might seem churlish and negative. But his purpose in getting us to reflect on the flip side of ordinary pleasures is to open our hearts to something very positive: the higher form of happiness, totally devoid of suffering and stress, that comes only with total letting go. So he also taught dukkha as a noble truth in order to focus our attention on where the real problem lies: not in the stressfulness of experiences, but in our ignorance in thinking we have to cling to them. And it's a good thing, too, that this is where the issue lies. As long as there are mountains, there's not much we can do about their inherent weight, but we can learn to break our habit of lifting them up and carrying them around. We can learn to stop clinging. That will put an end to our sufferings.
From: The Weight of Mountains by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

So mindfulness is not always a broadly receptive state of mind. The relative breadth of its focus has to be elastic, dictated by the strength of restraint needed in the presence or absence of strong defilements.

And it’s ironic that mindfulness is often portrayed as broad in opposition to the supposed narrowness of concentration, for concentration is actually the mental state that the Buddha consistently describes as expansive. This is easily seen in the similes he uses to describe the four jhanas, all of which involve a full-body awareness....

So, to the extent that there is a distinction in the way the discourses represent the relative breadth of mindfulness and concentration, concentration is the quality consistently portrayed as broad and expansive, whereas mindfulness has to shift the breadth of its focus — sometimes broad, sometimes narrow — in line with events.
From: Right Mindfulness: Memory & Ardency on the Buddhist Path by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

The Buddha's picture of your experience is not that you're simply a passive observer of things, commenting on them. In other words, it's not like watching a TV show. The TV show is a given, and you simply like it or dislike it or you're neutral about it. That's all. But that's not the Buddha's picture of experience. He says that you're actively engaged in shaping your experience all the time. In fact, the extent to which your intentions are shaping your experience goes a lot deeper and is a lot more radical than you might imagine. This is one of the insights of Awakening: how much your present intentions are needed for you to experience even the present moment. As the Buddha points out, all of the aggregates — form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness — have an element of intention in them.

There are lots of different potentials from your past kamma that you can focus on in any given moment. Your choice of what to focus on is going to determine what you experience. For instance, there are potentials for different kinds of feelings. There are places in the body that, if you focused on them, could get you really tied up in anguish or pain. You could take the germs of a pain and build them into something really overwhelming. There are other places in the body where there's a potential for pleasure. If you learn how to focus there, you can develop a strong sense of refreshment, rapture, wellbeing. Then you can let that pleasure and refreshment permeate and fill the body in the same way that the cool water in a spring coming from the bottom of a lake can fill the whole lake with its coolness.

So you have the choice of what you're going to focus on now — which sensations in the body help create a sense of wellbeing, which ones could create a sense of dis-ease, what you're going to think about, what you're going to focus on. Those are choices you make all the time. You take these potentials and turn them into an actual experience. When you realize how you do this, you can learn how to make your choices more skillfully.
From: Beyond Nature by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

So a good part of the meditation is often not just being with the breath but — if you find you've got a story that keeps obsessing the mind, stirring up greed, anger, delusion, fear, whatever — learning how to deal with that story, learning how to tell yourself new stories. Learn a corrective to the old stories. One of the basic ways of doing this is to reflect on the passage we chanted just now, developing thoughts of goodwill, compassion, appreciation, and equanimity. Try to develop these attitudes with respect to those stories so that you can tell yourself new stories that are easier to let go of in a liberating way.

In other words, you don't just push the stories away. You weave a new story and then you get to the point in the story where it's time to settle down and meditate. That way the story will leave you alone. When you come back out of meditation, the story may still be there but it's not the kind of story that's going to get you all worked up. It's been refashioned.

Learn to get more and more skillful at the way you tell stories in the mind, starting out with an attitude of goodwill. First, goodwill for yourself. You realize that if you sit here telling yourself bad stories over and over again, you're going to suffer. Do you want to suffer? Well, no. Do you want other people to suffer? Well, maybe. You may think about people who've wronged you, and of how much you'd like to see them get their just desserts. In cases like this, you have to ask yourself what you're going to gain from their suffering. You don't benefit in any way from their suffering. The fact that you're sitting there wishing suffering on them is harming you right now, getting in the way of your meditation.

So what you want is a story for yourself that ends up with your being happy and their being happy. That's your wish. That's the basic foundation for all the rest of the sublime attitudes.
From: The Story-telling Mind by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

So look at your life: What in your daily life tends to provoke anger? Watching TV? Listening to the radio? Well, maybe you should watch less TV. Turn off the radio. There is that principle called restraint of the senses, you know. When you look at things that provoke anger, it's often not the case that the things actually provoke your anger. You're out looking for anger because you want the storm. But what does the storm really accomplish, aside from a lot of damage?

Learn how to look at the people you dislike in a different way. Learn to think about the situations that would normally provoke anger in a different way. If you find that you can't look at the news without getting angry, it means you can't look at the news yet. You're not ready for it. If you want to get involved in social action, learn how to look at the news in a way that gives you ideas for what could be done, but without the anger. It's possible to recognize injustice and to work for change without getting stirred to anger. When you don't get stirred up in anger, you can work more effectively.
From: Always Willing to Learn by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

A view is true or false only when one is judging how accurately it refers to something else. If one is regarding it simply as a statement, an event, in & of itself, true & false no longer apply. Thus for the Tathagata, who no longer imposes notions of subject or object on experience, and regards sights, sounds, feelings & thoughts purely in & of themselves, views are neither true nor false, but simply phenomena to be experienced. With no notion of subject, there is no grounds for "I know, I see;" with no notion of object, no grounds for, "That's just how it is." Views of true, false, self, no self, etc., thus lose all their holding power, and the mind is left free to its Suchness: untouched, uninfluenced by anything of any sort.
From: The Not-self Strategy by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

I’ve had a lot of people who’ve practiced mindfulness methods where they were told simply to let the breath do it’s own thing. And then they come to the Ajaan Lee method, where he actually tells him to adjust the breath, play with the breath, work to get it comfortable. At first, they resist. But after a while, as they actually try the method, they become more and more sensitive to the element of intention in the breathing, and they begin to realize that even when they thought they were allowing the breath to do its own thing, they were actually manipulating it unconsciously. They’d been taught to overlook the extent to which they were already fabricating the breath.

So an important part of the meditation is to sensitize yourself to how much you are shaping things so that then you can actually let that process of shaping things calm down to a level you might not have imagined before. In the case of the breath, this means calming the breath to the point where all the breath energies in the body seem to connect up, and you’re getting enough oxygen through the pores of your skin so you don’t need to do any in and out breathing. And right there you’ve gained some insight into the process of fabrication at the same time that the mind is beginning to calm down. This is how tranquility and insight develop together using the body as your frame of reference.
From: Balancing Tranquility & Insight by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

When we compare the Buddha’s approach to that of the other two interpretations — advising you to break the precepts when you feel your motivation for doing so is compassionate, and advising you to break precepts to undercut any pride over your behavior — we can see clearly how inferior those interpretations are. By focusing on the dangers that come from being attached to the precepts, they leave you exposed to both levels of danger that can come from attachment to habits in general. On the one hand, both interpretations recommend exposing yourself to the needless bad karma that comes from breaking the precepts. This harms not only you, but also the world at large in terms of the direct results of your actions and in the compromised example you set. On the other hand, the two interpretations leave you exposed to the pride that can come from regarding yourself as above the precepts. This is a form of pride much harder to abandon than pride over holding to the precepts, for when you try to let it go, you’re faced with the harm you’ve caused to others by breaking the precepts. A sense of pride over causing no harm is easier to shed than a sense of pride that involved causing harm, because the act of dropping the first sort of pride leaves you safe from remorse and denial, while the act of dropping the second sort of pride leaves you with no defense.
From: Virtue Without Attachment by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

You may have heard that the Buddha taught, say, that there is no self. To what extent is the non-self teaching skillful? Where is it not skillful? Those are the questions he would have you look at, not the question of whether there is or is not a self. There are a lot of things that could be true, but this may not be the right time to think about those things. The Buddha has a teaching on Right Speech, where he says that speech can be true or not true, beneficial or not beneficial, welcome or unwelcome. He said to speak only those things that are true and beneficial. And as for the question of whether they're welcome or not welcome, he said look for the right time and place to speak. The same principle applies to our thoughts.
From: The End of Uncertainty by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

This need to remember is one of the reasons why we have to study the texts at least to some extent. A couple of months back I was asked to give a talk on the topic of whether it really is necessary to know anything about what the Buddha said if you’re going to meditate. If you think of mindfulness simply as being aware, there’s not that much that you would need to study. Your awareness is right here, it’s happening all the time, so what else do you need to know? But when you realize that mindfulness means keeping something in mind, you realize that you need to study some to know what things are the right things to keep in mind while you practice.
From: The Message of Mindfulness by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

[dhammapal]

Restraint of these senses doesn’t mean going around with blinders on your eyes or plugs in your ears. It actually forces you to see more than you normally might, for it requires you to become sensitive to two things:
(1) your motivation for, say, looking at a particular sight;
and (2) what’s happening to your mind as a result of looking at that sight.
In this way you bring the questions of discernment to bear in an area where you’re usually driven by the questions of hunger: the search to see or hear delicious things. You learn to view your engagement with the senses as part of a causal process.
From: With Each & Every Breath: A Guide to Meditation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu